Spring 2026

 

A space is already organizing the people who move through it: directing attention, pacing, and behavior before anyone can name how. This course draws methods from that observation, but applies them to a campus building and a downtown block, what we will call site-specific reframing. Not space as backdrop, but space as argument. The working hypothesis is that the strongest projects do not simply reveal how a place directs a body, they become systems that direct it differently. This course is about reading a site closely, then rebuilding that reading into something that operates on its own terms.

Students move through three modes across the semester. In Project 1, students guide attention through movement, pairing a large-scale supergraphic with a digital companion interface to build a short journey through a campus building that reveals how a familiar space is already structured. In Project 2, students re-frame a site through projection mapping, mapping a downtown building with light and motion to introduce a new reading of a place people already pass through daily. The semester culminates in a collaborative immersive installation, in which teams combine projection mapping with supergraphics to transform a gallery space into an environment visitors move through rather than a work they simply view. The site itself, whether a hallway, a façade, or a gallery, is the ground condition from which everything else follows: it is not neutral material waiting for content, it is already a structure of decisions about who moves where, yet it is rarely read that way. What changes when a familiar place is treated not as a backdrop, but as something built, and something that can be built differently?

 

Reference: Erik Beltrán, concept map